Brazilian shot to death not on deportation list

Wednesday

Jul 30, 2008 at 2:00 AM

Andre Luiz de Castro Martins was in and out of court more than a dozen times in the past six years for charges including assault and battery with a car, malicious destruction of property, and threatening to kill his girlfriend.

PATRICK CASSIDY

Andre Luiz de Castro Martins was in and out of court more than a dozen times in the past six years for charges including assault and battery with a car, malicious destruction of property, and threatening to kill his girlfriend.

Most recently, he had been charged Friday for driving without a license. It was the fourth time since 2002 that he had been charged for driving without a license. Another time, he had been charged with driving on a suspended license.

But despite a history of run-ins with the law and having overstayed a tourist visa, the 25-year-old Brazilian man, who was shot to death by a Yarmouth police officer after a high-speed chase early Sunday morning in West Yarmouth, had never been deported.

In fact, the federal government did not have a warrant of deportation out for him, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Paula Grenier said.

The investigation into Martins' death is ongoing and Yarmouth police have been told to refer all questions regarding the case to Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe. There was no further official information on the case as of yesterday, O'Keefe said.

But local police and immigration officials said yesterday that not all people who are in the country illegally trigger deportation proceedings automatically when they are arrested.

Immigration status is one of the background checks that police run on suspects, however.

"Once (a suspect is) through being booked you run him through certain queries," said Barnstable Police Chief Paul MacDonald, who .declined to comment on any specifics from the Yarmouth shooting.

Police run an arrested individual's identity through the National Crime Information Center and forward it along to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, MacDonald said.

If a hit comes back for a deportation warrant, the appropriate federal agency is notified and an order to detain the person is usually sent to the court, he said.

Police do not randomly check the immigration status of everybody with whom they interact, said Falmouth police Sgt. Percy Kennedy.

A person stranded with a flat tire, for example, would not warrant a check of any sort. A crime suspect is a different matter.

"If you run across somebody who has committed a crime against a person or especially a felony, there are checks across the board," Kennedy said. "There is no difference if it was an American citizen as to how deeply you do a background check."

But there are gray areas for everybody, he said.

An assault and battery that is a minor fistfight may not warrant as intense scrutiny as one that results in major injuries, Kennedy said.

Domestic cases are looked at by a department's civilian domestic violence advocate and the court, he said.

"You have many different eyes looking on the situation — not just the police," Kennedy said.

The federal government also has ways to track illegal immigrants in the justice system.

They use a criminal alien program, for example, to check local jails and state prisons, Grenier said.

"We review the foreign-born population in the jails to see if those in custody by the state are subject to removal," she said.

If immigration officials do not have a particular individual in their system and a local agency does not contact the agency, immigration officials have no way of knowing someone should be deported, Grenier said.

Once a person lands in jail, there are other checks that can be done, said Barnstable County Sheriff James Cummings.

The jail now has eight officers who are trained to search for immigration violations and who are in contact with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement liaison, Cummings said.

In the future, those officers may be trained to fully process illegal immigrants who have a deportation warrant out in their name, he said.

The jail currently houses about a dozen people awaiting deportation, Cummings said.